Picture this: It’s Monday morning, and you spent the night in your situationship’s Jewett coffin. You’re running late for your 9 a.m., already out of breath from running down eight flights of stairs because the singular elevator in the building refuses to stop on their floor. Lo and behold, you hit the lobby and make a beeline to the door, only to be confronted by bright eyes, bushy tails and red lanyards. Your biggest fear is realized as a tour group led by a student with too much pep in their step for the time of day and day of the week makes its way single-file into the building. You freeze, like you’ve been caught by that one aunt who enjoys airing out your business to the whole family, as their eyes dart around the room and toward you. As you duck out the door and into the rain, which you were also not prepared for, you ponder a solution to the humiliation. Then it dawns on you: Vassar should have a monorail.
Think about it: prospective students are already gawking at you and the campus as if Vassar is a foreign habitat and you’re a prime example of what it’s like to live here. Why not give them the full viewing experience and have a cute little train that zooms them around campus and conveniently out of your way? It would also add the New-York-City flair many out-of-staters come to Vassar hoping to experience, in contrast to the otherwise small-town vibe of the campus.
Let’s talk logistics. By day, the monorail would be reserved for tour groups in the first few cars, and by night, a full-fledged savvy replacement to the current campus shuttle system that many of us forget about. Not only would prospective students benefit from this system, but the cross-campus commute of current students would be revolutionized! The system would specifically prove an asset to the STEM majors who enrolled in an introductory dance course immediately after their four-hour lab thinking it would de-stress them, but instead found themselves sprinting from the academic quad to Kenyon with all of 10 minutes on the clock.
Of course, many good things in life come with a catch. The time is now 5:55 p.m. on a Thursday, and you’re trying to get from Josselyn House to Sanders Physics for your 6 p.m. Computer Science lab. Dressed in PJs you’ve had since middle school, you hop onto the hypothetical, oh-so-convenient monorail and encounter your friend’s friend who you matched with on Tinder and never responded to. Shame engulfs you, and you awkwardly wave, only for them to pretend like you don’t exist. Like many other Vassar students who are not subject to back-to-back lab days, this individual is already dressed for the weekend, probably taking the monorail over to the TAs. You become painfully aware of your lack of fashion sense and count the stops until the quad. The silver lining of this particular situation is that instead of wondering whether the blurry figure approaching you was indeed who you thought it was, you received immediate confirmation, saved from awkward squinting and stumbling over yourself in the process.
So the next time you find yourself late to class, attempting to outpace a tour group without embarrassing yourself, consider petitioning for a campus monorail!